is christianity a religion for neurotypicals?

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I think The Searcher's wording was such that he could be taken to be presenting his highly controversial ideas as fact. He didn't enclose them in such phrases as "the Catholic faith holds that......" or "my personal belief is....." There was also his opening comment that said many of us here claim to be atheists, which may be a tad provokative because it kind of insinuates the rather triggering idea that atheists aren't genuine. He did seem to be trying to argue the case for his religious brand, which isn't quite what the topic is supposed to be about.

I'm not saying any of that was deliberate, or even that it was a particularly stupid thing to do. I think it's quite hard to have a calm, respectful discussion about religion unless everybody involved is pretty good at diplomacy. Otherwise it descends into acrimony and goes nowhere.

Religion can be a very thorny issue when theists and non-theists discuss it, and I think it's wise to choose our words carefully when presenting our individual views. I personally see no sense in The Searcher's idea about contraception, but I don't think he's psychotic. Religious views can come over as crazy to rational minds, which may be why Aspies so frequently reject them, but it's clear from the way the ancients thought - e.g. a Pythagorean notion that the world must be round because a sphere is the most beautiful shape there is - that such poetic thinking, insane though it is to my modern ears, is no particular bar to mental health. It's just a different way.

Okay, I don't think this is going to work. When I first signed up for this forum, I wanted to find Aspies to help me with a game I am currently struggling to make. I wrote a story featuring a character that has high-functioning autism, even though I did not know it at the time. I just wrote things from a personal perspective and why I struggle with peopleling. The story presents the moral dilemma of saving the world, which sounds simple enough until you find out the people you are saving. It was a personal story with a religious background, though not explicit. I came to meet people in this forum and get to know them better so I could ask for help, but I guess that won't work.

Look, I can't stand it when an atheist says he is more rational than religious people yet behaves like a Christian fundamentalist. You get religious psychoticism in the Salem witch trials and atheist psychoticism in the Soviet Union. Atheists and religious people seem to be the same since I find many "rationalists" hypocritical by challenging opposing claims as irrational without explaining anything just like the Christian fundamentalists when they preach. Even if I do disassociate myself from reality, people who make the claim sound just like the Christian fundamentalists I had to deal with back then who thought I was insane for condemning the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and having a skeptical view towards laissez-faire capitalism. I used the just war doctrine and distributism to explain my viewpoints, and I got called a communist. I struggled to find friends throughout my childhood and teen years, and, like every Aspie, I would eat alone for lunch. This forum did not help me at all.

I am a Catholic, but I do have a moderate view towards evolution. I don't buy specifically Darwinian evolution, but I do believe there did exist an evolutionary process that made humanity. I take the Creation story as a poetical condemnation of Babylonian mythology according to biblical criticism. I am also a Thomist. I study Aristotelian-Thomism and even read the works of sincere atheists like Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre to avoid making straw-man fallacies when making rebuttals. I don't buy the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens since they condemn religion just because it sounds made up without giving me a logical reason why religion makes no sense. I even personally know atheists and agnostics who know that I have a passionate take on philosophy and want to be a critical thinker, and they find the New Atheists annoying as well. I am not an atheist, but I sympathize with the atheists who study logic and philosophy and find the New Atheists similar to trolls. I am sorry, but Wrong Planet is not the place for Aspies like me.

I'm sorry you feel that WP isn't a good place for you, though I fear you may be right.

Aspies are notorious for being rather blunt, and people who have rejected religion often have very uncomfortable memories of harmful pressure to believe, so I think it's often tempting for atheists to contradict the opinions of believers rather too harshly because they see them as representing the religionist forces that once gave them so much grief. Also, WP probably has far more atheists than religionists, so a religionist is likely to be subjected to a lot of criticism in a short space of time.

It would take a very secure and patient person to remain calmly immune from that for long. I doubt I could do it if the situation were reversed. I had a whiff of the same kind of problem some years ago when I accidentally made a post in Adult Autism Issues instead of In-Depth Adult Life Discussion. There were many in the former group with unusual sexuality and (I presume) a history of being persecuted for it, and my rather blunt words triggered a lot of anger that I was unable to quell, and I still feel somewhat resentful at the way I was misconstrued. If I'd picked the other group and been more careful with my words, I think I'd have got away with it.

In this PPR group I feel less at risk of attack when the subject is religion, but I sometimes feel like I'm in an echo chamber where I'll mostly get confirmational bias, when what I'd really like is for my ideas to be respectfully and rationally appraised and challenged, and for the ethos to be for everybody to learn from each other. I probably don't deserve that, as many of my posts here would probably trigger annoyance among religionists if there were many of them around. But I don't think the WP members are particularly nasty by any means. I think we're just human. I don't think many of us mean any harm.

You might find an interfaith group that better matches what you want. I gather those places often try hard to minimise conflict, and the very name "interfaith" (which usually embraces atheism as well as theism) suggests to me an ethos of tolerance and of leaving any hostility at the door where it belongs. As I vaguely suggested before, your ideas might be better received here if you more strongly emphasise your views to be your own opinions, but there's no guarantee. However carefully-worded, the very idea that somebody disapproves of something (contraception) can feel offensive to people who use it themselves and know that its benefits outweigh any harm as long as theological arguments are kept out of the matter.

I hope you didn't find my posts insensitive or scurrilous. I'm sorry if the Christians you were with saw you as worse than an atheist. I guess you were unlucky. According to surveys, American Christians in general feel more warmth even towards Muslims than they feel towards atheists, who seem to them to be the lowest of the low. I think Catholics were better received than Muslims. But it's only surveys, and in the real world it depends who you get.

Huh?
Are you saying that some extant religions in the world today were created by autistics?

Why not?

Neurodiversity includes more conditions than autism. Given all the religions there are, it seems likely that some who were neurodivergent were involved in the creation of some of them. Being a stickler for details and rules seems like it could come in handy when creating a belief system or being involved in the writing of a holy book. Yeah, beliefs often exist before holy books but scribes have a way of molding texts to fit their purposes.

Founders of major religions rarely have autistic traits.

Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Joseph Smith. None of them strike me as being anything other that NT leader types. Some might have been sociopaths.

And if a religion spreads its because it has a appeal to a population ...and most populations the world over are mostly NT.

That doesnt mean that small splinter sects might have founded by autistics or that religions dont evolve niches for various personality types including autistics. Autistics might make better Trappist monks/nuns than NTs. ADHDers might be good warriors ...to go on Crusades or Jihads. And like that.

“All religions” in the above quote isn’t quite the same thing as “all major religions.”

With that being said, there’s not enough information on any of the founders of the major religions to come to a definitive conclusion about them although those religions were more like an amalgamation of preexisting beliefs that grew over time than anything.

Autistics and NTs aren’t always THAT different. What appeals to NTs often appeals to autistics and vice versa.

I've got this theory that says nobody knows for sure. So it's perfect material for people to argue and speculate about. No danger of anybody wading in with the definitive answer and putting the matter to rest.

Speculation: I see that Thomas Acquinas is thought by some to have been autistic. He didn't found a religion as such, but he did found the theosophical school of thought called thonism, which I guess wasn't very different to a religion. But it's probably impossible to diagnose historical figures with much confidence. I've also known Christian apologists refer to Darwinism as a religion, but I think they're stretching the definition. Still, I do think Darwin was likely an Aspie.

I guess organized religion in general can sort of be ND because of the black and white thinking:

You're either good or evil, never in between.

You'll either go to heaven for being good, or hell for being evil

But then again, you can be NT and still have extreme black and white thinking.

^
I think there's probably something in the ASD black and white thinking notion, but I don't think it's that black and white. No, honestly I don't.

I guess rigid thinking is strongly related, and there may be a stronger case for that because I gather they've found experimentally that Aspies tend to have more trouble solving problems that require cognitive flexibility. The New Testament does seem to be rather rigidly expressed. But in my case, its rigidity puts me off. And curiously I've been described as a very nuanced thinker, though I wasn't like that so much when I was a child, and didn't like it when a teacher told me that most questions don't have black-and-white answers, because it suggested that life was about to get much harder than I'd thought it would be. In the end I had to admit he was right.

^ trust me: atheists can be plenty rigid in their thinking. If I am a Christian and I think I am right, and you are not a Christian and you think you are right, how exactly does that make one of us more rigid than the other?

The true story of the grandfather’s clock.

When I was a boy there was a clock that loomed large in my house. It was much taller than I was. It was even taller than my father. It stood on the floor next to the front door. The case was a dark brown carved wood, the works were made of shiny golden colored brass. The hands and numerals on the face were large and painted a mat black. It had a shiny brass pendulum that swung deliberately from left to right once a second. The door to the winding weights had a big glass oval window. The face (bigger than my head) had its own door. It would chime the quarter hour and one bell for each hour when the minute hand reached 12. When both doors were opened all the marvelous gears, hammers, chimes and chains were revealed. There was a confusing piece way up behind the face (which many years later I learned was called the “escapement”) that could only be glimpsed from just the right angle. I wondered about the clock. I wondered how it worked. I wondered how it could play Westminster chimes. Different each quarter of an hour, and different each hour. How did the weights and the pendulum make all that complicated mechanism go. But most of all I wondered who made the clock. And how he managed to conceive it. I never thought the clock made itself.

I have studied computers, electricity, sciences of physics and chemistry, and biology. It is all fascinating. I wonder how it all works. I have made a career of computers and science. Science can tell us many things about the world. But not all. It doesn’t tell us about the maker, and why he made it all and how he conceived it.

I can learn some things about the clock maker by studying the clock he made. But the maker is not the clock. I can learn some things about the Maker of the world by studying the world He made. But the world is not the Maker. The clock didn’t make itself. The world also did not make itself.

The Bible helps us to get to know the Maker.

For those who genuinely think Christianity is for people with a low IQ you might want to consider two counter examples:

Louis Pasteur
https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur

Br. Guy J. Consolmagno, S.J., PhD
https://www.vaticanobservatory.va/en/wh ... lmagno-s-j